Anthony Weiner, His Sex Messages, and His Wife

The defense offered up by Anthony Weiner—or shall we call him Carlos Danger, a name he apparently chose for online encounters?—to revelations of new sex messages, sent to a woman not his wife, is as needy and scratchy as his entire presence on the political scene. It has two parts: first, that his wife, Huma Abedin, had forgiven him—and, indeed, she not only stood beside him at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon but offered words of support—and second, that he had told us this might happen.

“I have said that other texts and photos were likely to come out, and today they have,” he said, a few hours after several of them, along with what purports to be a photograph he took of his genitals, appeared on a site called The Dirty and were reported on at BuzzFeed. He did say so, more than once, between when he quit his Congressional seat, in June, 2011, and when he decided to make us once again care about his judgment by running for mayor of New York this spring. The sense, though, was of a few loose ends—stray texts in the night. The new collection is its own messed-up catalog.

More than that, he had all but assured the public that the bad behavior ended when he was caught—that it was a social-media inflicted fever, one that he had shaken. At his press conference, though, he acknowledged that he’d kept going for more than a year after his resignation. “It’s in our rear-view mirror, but it’s not far,” he said. Quoted by The Dirty, the recipient of the messages says that they were sent between August and December, 2012. That is a year after Weiner became a national joke; it is almost remarkable that he could get anonymous people on sex sites to take him seriously.

Weiner talked about the relationship between the timing and the truth of his statements as if he were giving a synopsis of a “Dr. Who” episode. People had to understand that there was “some timeline, some timeline in the continuum of resignation”; “Some of these things happened before my resignation, some of them happened after.” So when did he stop? The decisive point, he suggested, was known to no one but him and his wife; all that mattered was whether he’d sent sex texts before or after she forgave him. That might well be an eternal tomorrow.

Abedin has been campaigning with him. At the press conference, she wore a dark cardigan and a bright printed skirt, and smiled—though that stopped briefly when Weiner said, “I’m surprised more things haven’t come out sooner.” When the scandal broke, she was pregnant; her choice to stay with him was, as she said to the press, entirely hers: “That was a decision I made for me, for our son, for our family.” But her grim insistence that he really ought to be mayor isn’t owed the same deference. Maybe Abedin was brave, but to what end? She has gone beyond the Good Wife, in part because there was no stricken expression, no bafflement, and a reference to having had, rather than planning to seek, “a lot of therapy.” This is the Preternatural Political Wife.

Abedin works for Hillary Clinton, and it is assumed that her ability to process and move past scandals has been informed by Clinton, who has been her mentor. Abedin’s performance today did not make one nostalgic for the Clinton-scandal years. If anything, it might make voters wary of more Clintons, and more steely expressions of forgiveness, as we head to 2016.

“While some things that have been posted today are true and some are not, there is no question that what I did was wrong. This behavior is behind me,” Weiner continued. But he declined to say what, exactly, wasn’t true: the part about the woman being twenty-two years old at the time (Weiner is now forty-eight), or about how, though they never met, he’d suggested she meet him at a condo in Chicago? (Since when does that particular real-estate term suggest romance, or even raciness?)

Abedin said that Weiner had made “some horrible mistakes, both before he resigned from Congress and after.” Will he make them before and after he becomes mayor? If voters let him. The issue here isn’t prudery but his pettiness, recklessness, and shaving of the truth. Asked about his lies to Abedin, he said, “She knew all along, this process, as I was more and more honest with her, I told her everything.” Where are the rest of us on the “more and more honest” continuum? Maybe all politicians lie; maybe many husbands do. But, as voters, do we have to listen?

Photograph by John Moore/Getty

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.